For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

It is instructive to trace the evolution of a political strategy based on securing this coalition in the writings and comments, over time, of such Democratic analysts as Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. Both men were initially determined to win back the white working-class majority, but both currently advocate a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics.

The 2012 approach treats white voters without college degrees as an unattainable cohort. The Democratic goal with these voters is to keep Republican winning margins to manageable levels, in the 12 to 15 percent range, as opposed to the 30-point margin of 2010 — a level at which even solid wins among minorities and other constituencies are not enough to produce Democratic victories.

“It’s certainly true that if you compare how things were in the early ’90s to the way they are now, there has been a significant shift in the role of the working class. You see it across all advanced industrial countries,” Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said in an interview.

In the United States, Teixeira noted, “the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class,” while in Europe, many working-class voters who had been the core of Social Democratic parties have moved over to far right parties, especially those with anti-immigration platforms.

Teixeira, writing with John Halpin, argues in “The Path to 270: Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election,” that in order to be re-elected, President Obama must keep his losses among white college graduates to the 4-point margin of 2008 (47-51). Why? Otherwise he will not be able to survive a repetition of 2010, when white working-class voters supported Republican House candidates by a record-setting margin of 63-33.

Obama’s alternative path to victory, according to Teixeira and Halpin, would be to keep his losses among all white voters at the same level John Kerry did in 2004, when he lost them by 17 points, 58-41. This would be a step backwards for Obama, who lost among all whites in 2008 by only 12 points (55-43). Obama can afford to drop to Kerry’s white margins because, between 2008 and 2012, the pro-Democratic minority share of the electorate is expected to grow by two percentage points and the white share to decline by the same amount, reflecting the changing composition of the national electorate.

The following passage from “The Path to 270” illustrates the degree to which whites without college degrees are currently cast as irrevocably lost to the Republican Party. “Heading into 2012,” Teixeira and Halpin write, one of the primary strategic questions will be:

Will the president hold sufficient support among communities of color, educated whites, Millennials, single women, and seculars and avoid a catastrophic meltdown among white working-class voters?

For his part, Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist and a key adviser to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, wrote a memorandum earlier this month, together with James Carville, that makes no mention of the white working class. “Seizing the New Progressive Common Ground” describes instead a “new progressive coalition” made up of “young people, Hispanics, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.”

In an interview, Greenberg, speaking of white working class voters, said that in the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, “we battled to get them back. They were sizable in number and central to the base of the Democratic Party.” At the time, he added, “we didn’t know that we would never get them back, that they were alienated and dislodged.”

In his work exploring how to build a viable progressive coalition, Greenberg noted, he has become “much more interested in the affluent suburban voters than the former Reagan Democrats.” At the same time, however, he argues that Republican winning margins among white working-class voters are highly volatile and that Democrats have to push hard to minimize losses, which will not be easy. “Right now,” he cautioned, “I don’t see any signs they are moveable.”

Teixeira’s current analysis stands in sharp contrast to an article that he wrote with Joel Rogers, which appeared in the American Prospect in 1995. In “Who Deserted the Democrats in 1994?,” Teixeira and Rogers warned that between 1992 and 1994 support for Democratic House candidates had fallen by 20 points, from 57 to 37 percent among high-school-educated white men; by 15 points among white men with some college; and by 10 points among white women in both categories. A failure to reverse those numbers, Teixeira warned, would “doom Clinton’s re-election bid” in 1996.

Teixeira was by no means alone in his 1995 assessment; he was in agreement with orthodox Democratic thinking of the time. In a 1995 memo to President Clinton, Greenberg wrote that whites without college degrees were “the principal obstacle” to Clinton’s re-election and that they needed to be brought back into the fold.

In practice, or perhaps out of necessity, the Democratic Party in 2006 and 2008 chose the upscale white-downscale minority approach that proved highly successful twice, but failed miserably in 2010, and appears to have a 50-50 chance in 2012.

The outline of this strategy for 2012 was captured by Times reporters Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler a few months ago in an article tellingly titled, “Obama Charts a New Route to Re-election.” Calmes and Landler describe how Obama’s re-election campaign plans to deal with the decline in white working class support in Rust Belt states by concentrating on states with high percentages of college educated voters, including Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire.

There are plenty of critics of the tactical idea of dispensing with low-income whites, both among elected officials and party strategists. But Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science at Rutgers, puts the situation plainly. “My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there, it is because there are no fish.”

As a practical matter, the Obama campaign and, for the present, the Democratic Party, have laid to rest all consideration of reviving the coalition nurtured and cultivated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.

A top priority of the less affluent wing of today’s left alliance is the strengthening of the safety net, including health care, food stamps, infant nutrition and unemployment compensation. These voters generally take the brunt of recessions and are most in need of government assistance to survive. According to recent data from the Department of Agriculture, 45.8 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population, depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to meet their needs for food.

The better-off wing, in contrast, puts at the top of its political agenda a cluster of rights related to self-expression, the environment, demilitarization, and, importantly, freedom from repressive norms — governing both sexual behavior and women’s role in society — that are promoted by the conservative movement.

While demographic trends suggest the continued growth of pro-Democratic constituencies and the continued decline of core Republican voters, particularly married white Christians, there is no guarantee that demography is destiny.

The political repercussions of gathering minority strength remain unknown. Calculations based on exit poll and Census data suggest that the Democratic Party will become “majority minority” shortly after 2020.

One outcome could be a stronger party of the left in national and local elections. An alternate outcome could be exacerbated intra-party conflict between whites, blacks and Hispanics — populations frequently marked by diverging material interests. Black versus brown struggles are already emerging in contests over the distribution of political power, especially during the current redistricting of city council, state legislative and congressional seats in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.

Republican Party operatives are acutely sensitive to such tensions, hoping for opportunities to fracture the Democratic coalition, virtually assuring that neither party can safely rely on a secure path to victory over time.

President Barack Obama lost white working-class voters in this Rust Belt state during the 2008 Democratic primary, after describing them as bitter people who “cling” to God and guns. He didn’t do much better with them in the general election.

And now, three years into his presidency, Obama is still struggling, despite accomplishments that would seem to appeal to blue-collar workers: guaranteed health care, a crackdown on Wall Street and a rescue of the auto industry.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: If Obama loses a substantial chunk of his white working-class support, he probably can’t carry Pennsylvania.

And without Pennsylvania, he probably won’t win the White House.

So Obama touched down in the heart of Pennsylvania’s blue-collar territory Wednesday to mount what is shaping up to be, at least at this point, another tough sales job to working-class voters here and across the Rust Belt.

Not only have these voters been battered by the economic downturn, they always have lacked a sense of allegiance toward Obama. Rife with political dynasties, Pennsylvania doesn’t quickly warm to newcomers — a dynamic that helped propel Hillary Clinton, a familiar face after years of traveling the state with her husband, past Obama in the 2008 primary.

A spate of recent surveys show that a majority of Pennsylvania voters now disapprove of Obama’s job performance. A closer look at the numbers shows why.

Only 33 percent of white working-class voters in Pennsylvania say the president deserves reelection, compared with 47 percent of college graduates, according to a Franklin & Marshall College Poll from early November. And the latest Public Policy Polling survey of Pennsylvania found 59 percent of white voters disapprove of his job performance, while 36 percent approve, surprising the pollsters who said such a spread is more typical of southern states, not those in the Northeast.

Obama isn’t going to win the blue-collar crowd — he lost them in Pennsylvania by a wider margin, 15 percentage points, than John Kerry did in 2004. He lost the same vote nationwide by 18 points against Republican John McCain.

But he can’t risk bleeding much more of their support, even as his coalition of minorities, young people, educated whites and single women grows in population while the Republican base of older, whiter, more rural voters declines, said Ruy Teixera, the co-author of a new report from the liberal Center for American Progress on the demographics of the 2012 electorate.

“He knows he’s not starting out on the right foot with these voters,” Teixera said in an interview. “He is well aware that, given the structure of the electorate in the state, he doesn’t want that 15-point deficit to yawn into a widening gap.”

That means Obama will need to spend more time in Pennsylvania than recent presidential voting patterns, registration numbers and demographics would suggest. Every Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton in 1992 has won the state. Democrats enjoy a more than 1 million voter-registration edge. And Democratic operatives here and in the Obama campaign argue that weaknesses in the Republican field and the president’s latest push on jobs better position him to woo working-class voters.

But with dismal job approval numbers — and Republicans now holding the governor’s office, the Legislature and two-thirds of the state’s seats in Congress — Obama has work to do.

His two-hour sweep through Scranton, although an official presidential visit, had the distinct feel of a campaign swing.

Only a few hours before he jetted to New York for a trio of high-dollar fundraisers, Obama stopped first in the Southside neighborhood, where the modest homes are decked out in Christmas lights, wreaths and pumpkins, and windows display stickers supporting troops abroad.

Obama sat down with Patrick and Donna Festa in their dining room draped in holiday decorations, from the Christmas plates on the table to the red-and-green-speckled cookies served the president. A picture of the Festas’ son holding rosary beads watched over them as they discussed how the couple, a third-grade teacher and a graphic artist, would benefit from the payroll tax cut that Obama is pressing Congress to extend.

Minutes later, Obama stood on the stage at Scranton High School, talking tough with Congress for opposing the bulk of his jobs plan and positioning the fight over the payroll tax cut as an epic struggle between Republicans protecting millionaires and Democrats fighting for the middle class.

“When this jobs bill came to a vote, Republicans in the Senate got together and they blocked it,” Obama said. “But here is the good news, Scranton: Just like you don’t quit, I don’t quit. I’m going to do everything I can without Congress to get things done.”

The go-it-alone, anti-Congress rhetoric drew a roar of applause from the crowd of 1,900, although one older man in the audience later shouted out, “You got to get tougher!”

Obama’s move toward a populist jobs message could be what saves him in Pennsylvania, said former Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Rendell said, Obama can actually make gains with the working class — not only because he is now speaking their language on jobs but also because Republicans have a record that won’t be easy to defend.

“The president has a real chance to pick up significant votes among the voters he lost and in the counties he lost,” Rendell said in an interview. “Republicans have made every mistake in the book.”

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney poses the biggest threat to Obama here, in part because of his appeal to the moderate, vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs. Two polls in the past month found Obama tied with Romney, a better showing than anybody else in the Republican field.

But the Obama campaign and veteran Pennsylvania operatives see obvious weaknesses that they are prepared to exploit.

Romney has called Obama’s proposal to expand and extend the payroll tax cut a “Band-Aid” — a phrase the president has incorporated into his stump speech. He opposed the auto bailout and called Obama “out of touch” for encouraging young people go into manufacturing.

Obama supporters have also taken comfort in Romney’s fading popularity in Pennsylvania, as captured by Public Policy Polling, which showed his favorability rating drop from 52 percent to 46 percent over the past six months, while his unfavorable rating jumped from 25 percent to 39 percent.

“It is a question of who is on the side of the middle class,” said Jack Shea, president of the Allegheny County Labor Council, who is personally supporting Obama and spoke on the campaign’s behalf. “We’re going to look at who is out there fighting for us.”

Romney pushed back Wednesday via Twitter, saying then-Sen. Joe Biden was right when he said in 2007 that Obama wasn’t ready to be president.

“Half a million Pennsylvanians are out of a job today,” Romney tweeted.

Ahead of the 2008 election, John Dougherty, head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98 in Philadelphia, made an unusual appeal on behalf of Obama. He sent MP3 players to all of his members, explicitly urging them to look beyond race and back Obama for his commitment to union households.

The pitch for 2012, Dougherty said, is similar: Look at what Obama has done and what he is trying to do now on jobs.

“When it is all said and done, he’s got to work at it,” Dougherty said. “People aren’t doing as well as they were.”

Rosemary Schirg, 72, a resident of the Southside neighborhood that Obama visited, said Scranton Democrats are looking at the Republican alternatives and that the president has ground to make up in the working-class town.

“Oh, yeah, he does,” said Schirg, a Democrat who voted for Obama in 2008.

But for now, he can still rely on her. She said she’s more frustrated with Congress for obstructing Obama’s initiatives.

“I may not agree with everything he has done, but I’m very strong in feeling he is our president and we should stand behind him,” Schirg said as she waited for a glimpse of Obama. “No president is going to do everything perfectly.”

Proponents of gay marriage will celebrate today’s statement by President Obama in which he put himself on the side of changing the traditional definition of marriage as a courageous stand that marks a turning point in the nation’s attitudes on the issue. But as with the case of his positions on human rights crises in Libya and Syria, the president was “leading from behind” as he is just the latest major figure in his party to jump on the gay marriage bandwagon. There is no question that support for greater acceptance of gays and even a willingness to contemplate some form of civil unions or gay marriage is widespread and not limited to the political left. Changing attitudes on the part of large sectors of the public who have more of a libertarian than a traditional approach have rendered Obama’s position more a function of the center than the margins.

The decision also reflects a belief among Democratic strategists that even the most divisive social issues work in their favor, because any debate on abortion, contraception or gay rights allows them to paint the entire GOP as intolerant. Just as they were able to turn a discussion about the way ObamaCare attacked the religious freedom of the Catholic Church into one about a bogus war on women, they may now think a gay marriage initiative will work the same way in convincing the people who voted for Obama in 2008 they must turn out to fend off the GOP this year. In making this statement in the middle of his re-election bid after years of dithering on the issue, the president is sending a signal he believes this is the sort of thing he needs to do to fire up his otherwise unenthusiastic base. Rather than a “profile in courage” moment, Obama’s gay marriage stand seems more like an attempt to rekindle the flagging passion of the “hope” and “change” fan base.

Acceptance of gays is now commonplace in much of American culture, especially in popular entertainment where the depiction of gay couples is not thoroughly uncontroversial. To the extent that this reflects the gradual dying out of prejudice against homosexuals, this is to be applauded. But the problem here is the consequent desire of some in government to impose their values on all Americans. Tolerance and acceptance of gays has often been translated into discrimination against religious institutions that differ on the legitimacy of same-sex marriage if not on the rights of gay individuals. That is why Catholic and some Orthodox Jewish agencies have been chased out of adoption services much to the detriment of children in need.

Once we strip away the political cynicism from the president’s statement what we find is an unbalanced approach that will, in the hands of all-powerful government agencies that Obama and the Democrats seek to make even more unaccountable, launch a new wave of discrimination against those who cannot for religious reasons accept gay marriage on these terms. It is on this point that many Americans who might otherwise be inclined to accept the president’s decision must demur.

As has been made apparent on many recent occasions when voters in states as diverse as North Carolina and California have been asked whether they wish to change the definition of marriage, the answer of the majority is no. Some may consider this a civil rights question in which the majority cannot be allowed to rule. But until this issue becomes one which cannot be employed to wage a kulturkampf against traditional religious believers, one suspects that many, if not most Americans will not be comfortable in throwing out existing laws. As Nate Silver notes in a blog post in the New York Times that supported Obama’s decision and considered it politically advantageous, though attitudes have shifted, as many Americans are strongly opposed to the measure as those who enthusiastically support it.

In this light, while it is possible the president’s statement will help with his base, a reasoned if low-key defense of traditional values will not hurt his opponent.

Congratulations to President Obama for matching his public policy with what everyone already knew were his private beliefs. His statement Wednesday that he supports same-sex marriage spared the public the ruse of waiting until after the election to state the inevitable.

First his Justice Department refused to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, and then Mr. Obama had said his views on the subject were « evolving. » The Beltway chatter now is that Vice President Joe Biden’s public support this week for gay marriage had cornered Mr. Obama into his own change of heart. But as with pretty much all Presidential actions lately, you don’t have to be a cynic to wonder about Team Obama’s political re-election calculations.

Everyone agrees that the election’s number one issue is the U.S. economy. Insofar as it’s not really possible for Mr. Obama to change that subject, he can at least give the chattering classes something else to write about. This qualifies. During a political cycle when few besides Rick Santorum wanted to talk about social issues, Mr. Obama has now reinserted one of the hottest into the debate.

One school of political thought holds that gay-rights issues typically hurt the person who raises them first. But perhaps the Obama campaign calculates that in a close election he will need a passionate base and that this will drive liberal and youth turnout in such important and evolving states as Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and New Mexico. On the other hand, Mr. Obama looks like he has just solved that problem Mitt Romney supposedly has with rousing cultural conservatives.

The Obama endorsement also guarantees that the media will not allow Mr. Romney to go anywhere without being interrogated on this subject. The Republican could do worse than to say he supports the Defense of Marriage Act that President Bill Clinton signed less than two months before the 1996 Presidential election, adding that he believes the issue ought to be resolved democratically by the states. That has left New York and five other states plus the District of Columbia to sanction gay marriage, while North Carolina on Tuesday went in the opposite direction.

This has the advantage of not turning gay rights into another abortion debate, whose pre-emption by the Supreme Court in 1973 has produced little but cultural discord for four decades. This time, let’s put a divisive social issue with sincerely held personal beliefs where such matters can be settled by consensus over time—in the state legislatures.

American public opinion on unions between same-sex couples—whether civil or matrimonial—is changing, with support growing. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney won’t arrive at a marriage of the minds on this subject, but the issue shouldn’t decide the election and we doubt it will.

In many of these areas, a large number of traditionally Democratic voters have long supported Republicans in presidential elections. Even now, Democrats have more registered voters than Republicans do in states like West Virginia and Kentucky, which have been easily carried by Republicans in every presidential contest of this century. As recently as a few years ago, Democrats still had a big advantage in partisan self-identification in the same states.

But during the Obama era, many of these voters have abandoned the Democrats. Many Democrats may now even identify as Republicans, or as independents who lean Republican, when asked by pollsters — a choice that means they’re included in a national Republican primary survey, whether they remain registered as Democrats or not …

This was written back in 1996, written by a man named Samuel Francis, He was an advisor to Pat Buchanan. I want to read to you from an essay he wrote called « From Household to Nation. » It was published in Chronicles magazine back in 1996. « [S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the de-legitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. »

The theory is that this is Donald Trump. « Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again? » What do you think might happen in the current climate, where the middle class in the country feels totally left out of everything going on?

They feel like they’ve been targeted by every liberal Democrat policy that has not been stopped by the Republican Party. What if you dropped [talking] about the free market, » stop all of that, « and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society … you simply promised to restore the Middle American core, » and everything it stands for?

You « promise to restore … the economic and cultural losers of globalization to their rightful place in America?

By the way, folks, Angelo Codevilla in that original piece he did on the ruling class versus the country class, he predicted this as well.

Codevilla said it was only a matter of time, the country class would figure out that the ruling class is not only not listening to them, but is actively suppressing them, and there would be a price to pay for this. At some point the country class, which considers itself the group of people that actually make the country work, would simply revolt and abandon the conventional arrangements that have always existed, the parties, party loyalty shmoilty. It would come down to who is going to fix the problems that everybody agrees are taking place that we face and are being pushed by people in Washington …

Among blue-collar Republicans, who have formed the core of Trump’s support, the polls were about the same regardless of method. But among college-educated Republicans, a significant difference appeared, with Trump scoring 9 points better in the online poll. The most likely explanation for that education gap, Dropp and his colleagues believe, is a well-known problem known as social-desirability bias — the tendency of people to not want to confess unpopular views to a pollster.

Blue-collar voters don’t feel embarrassed about supporting Trump, who is very popular in their communities, the pollsters suggested. But many college-educated Republicans may hesitate to admit their attraction to Trump, the experiment indicates.

In a public setting such as the Iowa caucuses, where people identify their candidate preference in front of friends and neighbors, that same social-desirability bias may hold sway.

But in most primaries, where voters cast a secret ballot, the study’s finding suggests that anonymous online surveys — the ones that typically show Trump with a larger lead — provide the more accurate measure of his backing …